ERWIN - enabling the reproducible investigation of waiting times for arbitrary workflows

Abstract

Delay effects can impact the Quality of Experience of interactive systems, which motivates research assessing delay impairments, mostly for web based systems. Current studies follow individual methodologies and typically assesses individual and custom-made web pages, whose construction requires expert knowledge in web technologies. Further, a range of native, non-web applications cannot be easily modified for delay studies. Thus, a generalized methodology for assessing delay impacts for a broad range of applications that is accessible to researchers without (web) development expertise is still missing. This paper contributes to this open problem by i) presenting a new methodology for reproducible delay assessments in a broad class of systems and ii) presenting an open-source implementation to be used by the community. This methodology particularly aims at making delay assessment available to a broad range of researchers by avoiding programming skills and thus by lowering the barrier for setting-up delay assessments.